Your reply to John Thompson is needlessly hostile and insulting. His question is valid. There is a tremendous amount of difference between imagining what something must be like and actually experiencing it. The world is full of sideline critics and backseat drivers. One thing those who actually teach learn is the countless small details that intrude between intention and execution. Before I began teaching I had many ideas about the job that proved unworkable. The only way to discover that was by actually getting out there and doing the work. Your sneering references to success and failure only serve to show how remote you are from reality. Failure is a part of everyone’s life, and if one is up to the challenge it can be a great teacher.

So, here is a follow up to John’s question. I assume that you consider yourself a capable, intelligent person. Why don’t you get a teaching job? Are you afraid to put yourself to the test?

And yet, schools can make a difference. Even if they can not overcome all the complex issues facing our students from impoverished families and neighborhoods.

The “schism” between Checker Finn and Diane Ravitch is largely a construct of our ed reform misconceptions and mostly a distraction from the common goal of both Checker and Diane: enabling our children to learn well.

There is no disconnect between quality health care and quality learning. There is no disconnect between supporting families and learning well. There is no disconnect between social services and education.

But there is a large disconnect in assuming that the failure of our schools is due in most part to the failure of our social programs. It is not.

Internationally, quality school systems ARE able to enable children of low SES to learn well. (In great contrast to our schools.) They do not do this with “social services” alone but with a school system focused on student learning.

Should we allow schools to provide social services to those student in need? Of course. It would be cruel to do otherwise. But to assume that these social services will bridge the gap in academic learning is mistaken at best.

Currently, our students are ill served by our schools. Improving social services will not change this. What our *schools* need is a better way to educate our students, not one more reason that they can not do so.

My claim is that there is ample large scale research that indicates that the performance of students can be raised by a standard deviation in language, reading, math, and spelling at the k-3 level by the whole school DU intervention. This would be sufficient to substantially close the achievement gap as defined under NCLB and bring the typical Title 1 school up to the national norm.

There is also also evidence that the increase can be sustained to the fifth grade level.

There is not a failure of acknowledgement, there is a failure of implementation.

Are you a successful educator, John? Have you ever successfully taught a classroom of typical title I students such that at the end of your teaching the students were performing at levels comparable to their mainstream peers?

If you haven’t successfully taught, why is your opinion any more valid than any one else’s. Any fool can be a failure and express an opinion based on that failure.

Have you ever taught?

Social service providers have largely failed in their full goals for the same reason as schools have — isolation. We need to bring poor families and children into networks.

Is this your opinion, John, or do you have some evidence, preferably in the form of a controlled experiment, that shows that providing social and educational services together is more effective than providing them apart? I know of no research that supports this statement.

My students don’t have dads to teach them certain skills and to introduce them to jobs. This cuts them out of the mentoring that would come from the blue collar job world.

This has little to do with student achievement. Rather it affects opportunities for those who have failed to achieve.

So our goal must be a learning culture that brings adults of all types and personalities into schools. We must bring social agencies into the schools. And we must bring the students out of the classroom into the broader world.

Again, is this your opinion or do you have some support for this statement?

Finally, like Rothstein I don’t claim to have answers to the toughest challenges except to assume:
a) we need multiple solutions and
b) we could reach solutions if we had [] people making enough effort in an eclectic manner.

What’s your basis for making such an assumption? Why do we “need” multiple solutions. What if one solution worked? Would we then still need another solution?

The history of education is a history of people making effort in an eclectic manner. Look where that’s got us. What basis do you have for thinking this will work being that it hasn’t worked in the past?

Put my faculty in the school down the road that is listed as one of the top fifty in the nation, and we wouldn’t miss a beat.

And if you put the faculty of that school in your school, performance would likely be the same as it is now. This is because neither school knows how to effectively educated the kind of kid found in your school. That is the problem — the teaching. The problem is not the students.

If we don’t know what the students are supposed to achieve, then who cares how well they achieve it?

Let’s say we agree on some knowledge, skills, and concepts that students should master. Then “achievement” makes sense. Even there, is “achievement” all that we’re after?

I try not to get all mushy, but I believe schools should have healthy if not warm environments. If students have fond memories of their schools, they will want to continue learning. I base this idea on personal experience, but it would be an interesting study: do school memories–and opportunities to return to the old school–foster continued learning? I suspect so. I have been concerned about the effect of multiple school closings on graduates’ morale. When they have no school to return to as alumni, when their school history has been effectively erased, how does this affect their education?

Large and small schools alike can be communities of a sort—in the style of a “university” or “family”–but to accomplish this, they need some way of countering the destruction in students’ lives.

It is ambitious and problematic for schools to try to become “second homes” for children–but to a modest degree we need to do this. Students need more of a fortress in their lives. They need better nutrition, counseling, tutoring, and opportunity to participate in activities. They need to learn how to build strength in themselves and resist pressure to conform.

It’s hard to see how something like “Broader, Bolder” wouldn’t improve student achievement, be it over the short or long term. But even if it didn’t narrow the gap–but just made children’s lives a little healthier and happier–I would support it. Yes, schools are for learning first and foremost, and should have a strong curriculum to make this possible. But they should be joyous places as well. (I don’t mean “fun” places; I agree with KDeRosa et al. that learning is not, cannot be and should not be always fun. I mean places that give meaning to students’ lives.)

Joy can come from the learning itself–but not when children have their parents’ fights or gang pressures on their minds, or have been eating so much sugar they can’t sit still. Not when the school shuttles kids in and out the door instead of making them welcome. Not when everything is geared toward the test–the results of which many not be available in the same school year! Not when the students wish more than anything to learn an instrument, join a sports team, participate in a math competition, or be in a play, but have no chance to do so, and no support at home.

No critique–not even Finn’s–necessarily undermines the initiative itself. We need to be clear about our goals and conscious of the difficulties and complications. Yes, there are likely some who would use “Broader, Bolder” to escape “accountability.” And there are others who will shamelessly cheat on high-stakes tests. Any plan can be perverted and abused, and we need to be forthright and vigilant.

In this light, I find encouragement in the Ravitch/Finn exchange. Perhaps it is a “schism” of sorts (or, as Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun puts it, a “Clash of the Titans”); perhaps they represent two camps with different sets of goals. But must that necessarily be so? Is it not possible to believe in this initiative, while raising and addressing concerns? Is it not possible to adopt excellent curricula and help students address, overcome, maybe even transcend the overwhelming problems in their lives?

I’d begin with more modesty and placing numbers in context. I have no personal experience that allows me to judge your statement about the full standard deviation vs. Rothstein’s. I do have enough experience to be a consumer of research, and I have great confidence in the way Rothstein approaches problems, uses evidence, and points us in the right direction.

But getting back to your question, we need to address the “six degrees of separation” dynamic. I’ll say upfront that my understanding of that issue comes primarily from Malcolm Gladwell and the debate he prompted, and although I have a good idea of the methodological issues and the story line, I don’t have the math to judge. (although the evidence doesn’t seem to be too quatitative to me) Social service providers have largely failed in their full goals for the same reason as schools have — isolation. We need to bring poor families and children into networks. My students don’t have dads to teach them certain skills and to introduce them to jobs. This cuts them out of the mentoring that would come from the blue collar job world. I had one Black male last year who had two parents, and he transferred in froma magnet school. Without father, where do you get the uncles, the male neighbors, the coaches, and the rest of the village that helped raised working class kids of my generation. So kids raising kids means kids being initiated by kids and kids not having any way to hook up with the networks that provides jobs, and the skills and the hope that jobs provide.

So our goal must be a learning culture that brings adults of all types and personalities into schools. We must bring social agencies into the schools. And we must bring the students out of the classroom into the broader world. When I hike the Grand Canyon, I see dozens of middle class kids getting a great holistic education. When I’ve brought poor kids to the Canyon they also gained awarenesses of Nature and the world’s cultures that were completely beyond her imagination. They also got to test themselves, their endurance and their ability to challenge themselves.

Ten years ago, when I was encouraging a girl, who I now consider to be my daughter, she said, “Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody has ever encouraged me. My family has just been saying that I’ll can never make it out.” This spring when she took her students from Bed Stuy (special ed students who hadn’t been brought on school trips before she taught there, to Washington D.C. and she brought them into a motel room, she shocked a student by falling into the motel bed. He had never been in a motel before but he knew that you had to show “respect.” You don’t just jump into a motel bed like any other bed. He didn’t know how you are supposed to get into a motel bed, but he figured that there was something special to it.

Finally, like Rothstein I don’t claim to have answers to the toughest challenges except to assume:
a) we need multiple solutions and
b) we could reach solutions if we had effort people making enough effort in an eclectic manner.

The first step is to acknowledge the truth - I would say obvious truth — of Rothstein’s. Almost every success is predicated on choice, and creaming the most motivated poor children and families. That leaves behind a greater critical mass of at-risk kids in the neighborhood schools. I would add to Rothstein the dirty secret that is no secret to educators who are actually in the buildings. When the spotlight is on an experiment, and people have invested their credibility, they will empower school administrators and if they are smart they will empower teachers. But in our reality, that means the educators in neighborhood schools will be more disempowered. And the biggest example is discipline. If the system allows a choice school to enforce its code of conduct, then that just means that neighborhoods lose even more of their power. As my old principal used to say, “they (meaning chronically disruptive and violent students)have to be somewhere and they might as well be in your class.” Assault a KIPP teacher, and the very next day you will be out the door — either to the streets or to a neighborhood school. Assault a neighborhood school teacher, and the full power of the system comes down on the teacher, pressuring him or her to go along. I bet the great majority of secondary inner city school teachers have seen this over and over, and we have all heard the same soundbites. The same applies to grade inflation, social promotion, and efforts to raise classroom standards.

We’re not any different from the teachers in higher performing schools except that they do not have to fight for the right to teach. Put my faculty in the school down the road that is listed as one of the top fifty in the nation, and we wouldn’t miss a beat. After all, they recruit our best teachers every year after they are too exhausted to continue.

and the most successful of school reforms generally only increase performance by 1/2 of a standard deviation

Actually, the best of school reforms achieve about a standard deviation of improvement in student achievement which is enough to substantial reduce or eliminate the gaps.

He reviewed the evidence that the successful schools described by Finn and others “requires that the more advantaged and able of all disadvantaged students be concentrated in special schools. and isolated from the destructive influences of more troubled peers”

The best interventions can be implemented in any school with any composition of students.

Here’s a question for you, John.

The correlation between SES and student achievement is less than 0.40. This means that the variance attributable to SES is less than 20%. This means that, at best, we’ll only be able to improve student achievement for low SES students by 20% by implementing these social and economic programs you favor. (Assuming that causation actual exists, which has never been shown.) This leaves 80% of the gap still in place after you implement your expensive programs? How do you propose eliminating this 80% remainder?